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In Britain, a Meeting on Limiting Social Media

LONDON — British officials and representatives of Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry met Thursday to discuss voluntary ways to limit or restrict the use of social media to combat crime and periods of civil unrest, while trying to dodge charges of hypocrisy and censorship that trailed Prime Minister David Cameron’s call to restrict use of the networks after this month’s riots.

The government’s home minister, Theresa May, according to one account of the meeting, said that the aim was not to “discuss restricting Internet services,” but to instead “crack down on the networks being used for criminal behavior.” A spokeswoman for Ms. May said the government “would not be seeking any additional powers.”

But the discussion, according to those present, was still aimed at reeling in social media and strengthening the hand of law enforcement in gathering information from those networks. In the wake of revolutions that have seen widespread calls for freedom and democracy, free-speech advocates have said, the British government is considering similar policies to those it has criticized in totalitarian and one-party states.

“You do not want to be on a list with the countries that have cracked down on social media during the Arab Spring,” said Jo Glanville, the editor of Index on Censorship, a magazine that campaigns for freedom of expression, noting that such actions could “undermine democracy.”

Indeed, Iran, criticized by the West for restricting the Internet and curbing free speech, seemed to savor the moment and offered in the immediate aftermath of the riots to “send a human rights delegation to Britain to study human rights violations in the country,” according to the semiofficial Fars News Agency.

Mr. Cameron had called for stronger controls on social media after nimble, smartphone-armed rioters and looters used the networks to outmaneuver the police. But while his call drew an outcry in some quarters, it also received heartfelt applause in others, where restoring order was seen as a higher priority than the rights of social networkers.

“I can understand why some people would feel uneasy,” said Gordon Scobbie, a senior police officer who leads efforts to sharpen the force’s social media presence and who was present at the meeting of Facebook, Twitter and the company that owns BlackBerry, Research in Motion. “But if they’re allowing criminal activity — and this was high-end criminality, people lost their lives in these riots — I struggle to see how that can just go on.”

“We have a duty to protect people,” he added, “and that’s always balanced with human rights, online or offline. It’s no different now.”

The officials and the executives met in private in government offices. The companies declined, beyond carefully written statements, to say what specific new measures they would be taking in cooperation with the British police and government.

Photo

A woman walked past a broken cafe window after clashes in Clapham Junction in early August in London.Credit
Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

But Mr. Scobbie said the group had discussed how far the networks might be willing to bend privacy rules to assist the police in pursuing online criminal activity. Twitter, he said, giving an example, could consider compelling people to use their real names instead of anonymous handles.

But on Friday a Twitter spokesman, Sean Garrett, said in a tweet that, “Twitter is not considering requiring real names and the meeting was not a “negotiation.” There was no immediate response to a message seeking further comment.

Research In Motion has already agreed to provide the British police information from the BlackBerry Messenger network — used by many rioters to organize and strategize — under certain circumstances, he said. They might consider allowing “protocols” for easier access in future. RIM has previously negotiated with Saudi Arabia and India to allow some monitoring of users’ messages.

Mr. Scobbie and others present at the meeting said that the police were also considering using social media analysis software tools to parse enormous quantities of data available online for signs of future unrest.

“When people use a telephone, under certain circumstances, law enforcement has a means of intercepting that,” he said. “Just because it’s different media, we shouldn’t stand back and say, ‘We don’t play in that space.’ ” The police, he said, must have authority online and in real life.

But Heather Brooke, a freedom-of-information advocate who has written extensively about privacy online, cautioned that such secret negotiations came “with no judicial review or accountability,” adding, “Who’s checking to see whether the police are just going around fishing for information on the whole population, or going for people or groups they don’t like?”

Ms. Glanville, the free-speech advocate, described “a panic, a knee-jerk response to criminality and immorality” behind such measures, citing the cases of two men sentenced to four years in jail each for posting Facebook messages encouraging rioting, though no riots occurred. Politicians and the British judiciary were “out of touch,” she said.

The police, she said, have found social media a useful tool, helping to catch hapless looters who posted pictures of stolen goods online, and communities have used the same networks to gather together to repair their neighborhoods. “It’s not about social media, it’s about the state of the nation. Instead of taking about our great difficulties, we’re talking about the medium.”

It is not the first time Britain has wrestled with such dilemmas. Last year, Paul Chambers, 26, frustrated by an airport’s closing, threatened in a jokey Twitter message to blow the airport “sky high.” When he was arrested and fined, losing his job in the process, he became a cause célèbre, with the comedian Stephen Fry among those offering support for his case. This year, tens of thousands of Twitter users flouted a court order imposed on more traditional media and named a soccer player, Ryan Giggs, who was said to have had an affair with a reality TV star.

Some of the nations that have been criticized by the West for their own draconian crackdowns on inconvenient freedoms of speech have watched Britain’s recent struggles with barely disguised glee. In China, The Global Times, a government-controlled newspaper, praised Mr. Cameron’s comments, writing that “the open discussion of containment of the Internet in Britain has given rise to a new opportunity for the whole world.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 26, 2011, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: In Britain, A Meeting On Limiting Social Media. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe